FRANCE: 300,000 attend anti-globalisation festival

BY DANNY FAIRFAX

More than 300,000 people attended demonstrations, forums, film showings and concerts in the Larzac plateau region of southern France on August 8-10. The Larzac Festival was held under the slogan, Le monde n'est pas une marchandise ("The world is not for sale").

The festival was primarily targeted at the ministerial talks of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) — to be held in Cancun, Mexico, in September — and its goal of total deregulation of trade and services. Represented at Larzac were more than 150 organisations, including the festival's major organisers ATTAC France and the Confederation Paysanne (the French farmers' union).

The choice of Larzac as the event's location was not arbitrary; the plateau has been an area of constant political struggle for 30 years, initially against a planned military base and, more recently, against genetically modified crops, the liberalisation of trade regulations and the power of multinational corporations.

Included in the program was a concert on that featured performers Manu Chao and Asian Dub Foundation. Attended by 100,000 people, the concert was dubbed by Agence France-Presse as an "anti-globalisation Woodstock". However, conference organisers and participants consciously rejected the term "anti-globalisation", preferring to refer to themselves as altermondialistes ("those for another globalisation").

The festival was a demonstration of the strength and vitality of the social movements in France, which have been reinvigorated by mass struggles against the French government's anti-worker pension "reforms" and opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

One of the Larzac festival's key organisers, farmers' leader Jose Bove, who recently served a prison sentence for destroying GM crops, summed up the mood of the festival: "We are fighting for the values of humanism, equality and solidarity". He dropped a major bombshell when he announced that, from April 2004, he will no longer act as a spokesperson for the Confederation Paysanne, the organisation which he co-founded 15 years ago.

"Our struggle is not limited to the borders of one country, it is a struggle for all the farmers of the planet, and for me it is not a question of standing in local, national or European elections", he s added. "I have no inclination to remain the spokesperson, as it would be very dangerous to personalise the social movement. I don't want to become the tree which conceals the forest."

The movement in France is gearing up for a "hot September". Actions will include: a European convergence on Rica del Gado in Trente, Italy, against a meeting of European trade ministers on September 3-5; a day of manifestations in cities across France on September 6; and a day of symbolic blockades on September 9. All will feed into the global day of action against the WTO's Cancun summit on September 13.

The outer-Paris suburb of St Denis will also host the second European Social Forum in November, which is set to be a further expression of the strength of the movements in France and around Europe.

Fausto Bertinotti, national secretary of Italy's Partido della Rifondazione Comunista (Party of Communist Refoundation), declared in the British Guardian on August 11 that the era of "reformist social democracy" in Europe is dead, crushed on the one side by a ruthless, globalised capitalism and on the other by the movement against capitalist globalisation, which has become "the main source of politics for an alternative to the global right".

From Green Left Weekly, August 20, 2003.

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From GLW issue 550